Turtles! Ducks! Stability of Ice/Rock Mixtures with Application to Titan!

Hello Adoring Fans! Let me tell you a story. About 4.55 billion years ago, in a spinning disk/cloud of dust, gas, and other stuff, our solar system began to form. The sun turned on. C1 chondrites (awesome meteorites) condensed, preserving a key to the bulk elemental composition of the solar system. About 30-50 million years later, something about the size of Mars slammed into the proto-Earth, fucking melting the shit out of everything and flinging a cloud of debris into space that eventually condensed into our Moon. But before that, in the vicinity of Saturn, something very special was happening. Titan, the second largest satellite in the Solar System and currently the only celestial body in the Solar System besides Earth to have large, stable bodies of liquid on its surface, began to form out of various bodies with inhomogeneous density. Various processes occurred, driven by the relative densities of ice/rock mixtures within the planet and by the ability of convection to remove radiogenic heat. Recent measurements of Titan's gravitational field (gathered by Doppler Tracking the Cassini spacecraft during a few flybys) allowed the determination of it's moment of inertia coefficient. Like Callisto (but unlike Ganymede!), Titan is incompletely differentiated. That is, unlike Earth, its deep interior does not feature defined layers with distinct composition (iron-rich core and silicate mantle in the Earth, in contrast). So, there's probably a layer of intermixed ice and rock.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? IS THIS CONFIGURATION STABLE?!?!?!?!? WHAT CONSTRAINTS DOES THIS PLACE ON THE CONDITIONS OF ITS ACCRETION?!?!?!?!!?

I DON'T KNOW I DON'T KNOW I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR TWO DAYS STOP YELLING PLEAZE.

But before classes start, I will have something coherent to say.

And possibly pictures of a gathering of infinite turtles.

Yes.

Oh PS - I'm working at CalTech now. It's very pretty here. Lots of sunshine and palm trees and turtles. Have I mentioned the turtles? I saw two ducks today too. They appeared to be friends with the turtles. Turtles! It's turtles all the way down!